Asst Prof Umang Mathur Receives 2026 Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award

NUS Computing is pleased to share that Assistant Professor Umang Mathur has been awarded the 2026 Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award under the Ministry of Education Singapore (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 grant. 

Established to support junior faculty, the award enables researchers to deepen their work and compete for larger grants as they progress in their careers. It is named in honour of Dr Robert Brown, founding Chairman of MOE's Academic Research Council.

As part of the AcRF Tier 2 grant, his project, "Foundations for Testing and Verifying Concurrency in Go”, will receive funding over three years to develop rigorous foundations and automated methods for understanding, testing and verifying how concurrent programs behave.

Modern software increasingly relies on many tasks running at the same time, and getting those tasks to interact correctly is difficult. Subtle mistakes can cause software to produce incorrect results, crash or stop responding. Such bugs often escape conventional testing because they surface only under particular combinations of timing and interactions.

The project focuses on Go, a programming language designed to make concurrent programming easier. Easier to write does not always mean correct, and the goal is to help developers uncover elusive concurrency bugs and build greater confidence in the software they create.

In addition to the Tier 2 award, Asst Prof Mathur will receive a S$100,000 top-up grant through the Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award to deepen this research and explore related directions.

This achievement reflects the School's continued work on reliable software systems and its support for emerging academic leaders.

Congratulations to Asst Prof Umang Mathur on this recognition!